A spectacular New Mexico
sunset as backdrop to the
Virgin Galactic Gateway
to Space terminal.
Credit: Spaceport America.
An early morning at Spaceport America with the Virgin Galactic vehicles shown in their hangar bay. The western portion of the terminal and hangar building is earth
bermed for energy efficiency and view preservation from El Camino Real historic trail, which passes 3 miles west of the spaceport. A taxiway runs eastward from the
terminal and hangar building to the spaceport’s 12,000-foot runway. Credit: Mark Greenberg
Lindbergh, who had flown over much of the country.
Finally, Goddard chose the town of Roswell in
southeastern New Mexico. He and his assistants
moved there in July 1930. His first rocket launch, in
December 1930, reached an altitude of 2,000 feet
and a speed of 500 miles an hour, far surpassing the
90 feet altitude and 60 mile-an-hour speed he had
accomplished in Massachusetts. Working in New
Mexico until 1942, he launched the first manmade
vehicle to travel faster than the speed of sound and
sent a rocket to an altitude of nearly 9,000 feet.
For essentially the same reasons Goddard had
selected southern New Mexico for his test site, the
US Army established White Sands Proving Ground a
hundred miles west of Roswell in 1945. They launched
their first atmosphere-testing rocket, the WAC
Corporal, at White Sands three months later. Rocket
development still continues at the White Sands facility,
which was renamed White Sands Missile Range (WSMR)
in 1958. Nearly all of the in-flight training for landing
space shuttles was conducted at White Sands.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, researchers
conducted vital experiments on human tolerance
for space travel at Holloman Air Force Base, 50
40
40
miles east of White Sands Missile Range. Those
experiments examined the effects of cosmic radiation,
microgravity, acceleration and deceleration forces,
and the physical and psychological effects of
confinement in a small capsule in a near-space
environment. The chimpanzees launched early in
NASA’s Mercury program were trained at Holloman.
Ideas for commercializing space
By 1990, southern New Mexico had been involved with
space programs for sixty years. It was part of the local
culture in Las Cruces, a city twenty miles west of White
Sands Missile Range. Burton Lee, whose mother lived in
Las Cruces, was a consultant to NASA on the idea of
developing an industry to supply commercial reentry
capsules for research and commercial use. That program
needed a recovery site for the capsules in the United
States. Lee talked to a couple of leaders of the Physical
Science Laboratory at New Mexico State University in Las
Cruces and the director of the WSMR Flight Safety Office
about possibly using the missile range for that purpose.
“At the same time, I was pursuing, on my own initiative,
this idea of a spaceport,” Lee said on The Space Show
in December 2006. “I wrote the initial market study,
www.RocketSTEM .org